Mist Moments

I managed to create a new render before the end of the year showing some rocky mountains in a light mist as the sun starts to go down. I have never done a scene with mist in it before so I thought I'd give it a go. It took a lot of tweaking to get the desired low flying fog effect, but I think it was well worth it.

Hairy Hamster

Here comes another render I've just made and this time after messing around with particles, I think I managed to create some kind of rodent. In this render I had 5 levels of ambient occlusion enabled, which made rendering a slow process, but it has really helped the shading in this scene.

Newton's Cradle

As you can see I have finally found the time to do another render. In this scene I have attempted to recreated a popular executive desktop toy, 'Newton's Cradle'. Enjoy:D

Rings Of Fire

It has been a while since my last post, so I decided to whip up a render for the Olympics showing off the five rings. Of course showing the Olympic rings on their own would of been a bit plain so I decided to give the scene a bit more heat :P

New World Sunset

This render shows a sunset on another planet :D
I had to embed multiple light sources where the sun appears in the background, to give the ground some reflection. There are also a few more dull light sources to improve overall lighting. As you may have noticed, this is a modified version of the scene used in the previous render.

Look Back In Anger

The return of the crazy alien on a barren planet. It is out for revenge, but on who? :P

Flap In The Wind

Here is a still render of the 'Flapping Flag' animation. I tried to capture a frame that showed some wind, but didn't distort the flag to much.

Razor Sharp

If you have not yet noticed, I have now put a download link on all of my animation posts :D
I have recently decided to upload my original animation videos onto a separate domain so anyone can now download the original higher quality versions.
To take a look at the range of animations I have created since I started this blog, click on the 'Animations' label in the right hand column.

Flapping Flag

Here is an animation I have created using cloth physics. A Union Jack is attached to a flag pole and the animation begins with the flag being hoisted up to the top. In this scene I used UV texturing on the flag so it stayed proportionally correct as the material moved around in the wind.

Download High Quality Version Here

Friday 13th

Here is a very quick render I made up in the past few hours for an infamous unlucky day, watch out! :P

Pinned Down!

I have finally got round to animating the bowling ally scene I made a while back. Here I used a physics engine on the ball and pins then tweaked a couple of key frames to make it more aesthetically pleasing.

Download High Quality Version Here

Video Recap

Here is a video I made on animoto to show off some of the still renders I have made so far. This video was created mostly for the visitors of my YouTube profile who may not have stumbled upon my blog yet :D

Mars Attacks....

...with a ridiculous looking alien :D
In this post I decided to start with something new. To keep up with the random genre, I think an obvious direction was aliens! :P
I plan to use this alien again in another scene, which I haven't thought of yet... but I can now after finishing this one :)
Enjoy!

The Halo Effect

After dabbling around with post rendering effects, I decided to upload a modified render from my previous blog post. This image has a Gaussian and vector blur added after the picture was created. The Gaussian effect was applied evenly in both X and Y directions followed by a slight vector blur on top. This gives the image a cool halo effect, which I may use again in a future animation using multidimensional arrays.

Spherical Patterns

Here are three renders I have created from the animation uploaded in the previous post. I have moved the camera slightly and readjusted the lighting to give it a better appearance. For these still shots I disabled the motion blur as the effect did not suit a motionless picture. Enjoy :D

Synchronized Spheres

Since my last animation was fluid, I decided to do something completely different this time round. In this scene I have created dancing synchronized spheres making something completely random :P

I decided to use a slight motion blur in the animation to emphasize the speed the balls are moving. The animation doesn't look to great in the standard low resolution of YouTube videos, I therefore suggest you go to the YouTube page with the video on and watch it in 'High Quality'

Download High Quality Version Here

Lava Lamp Light

It's time to unveil a new render again and this time around I have created a lava lamp with the red lava floating in a clear liquid. This lamp is standing in the corner of a room casting shadows of the lava and the lamp on the wall behind it.

Strike's Over

The render has finally finished so here is the second scene I made using the bowling ball and pins.

A Perfect 10

Another scene finished! :D
Here is a bowling ally I created complete with ball and pins. This scene took some time to create especially when trying to make the pins the correct shape as well as the ball holes. To achieve the best in a scene it takes time to perfect things including finding the right textures, which took a bit more effort with this one. Enjoy!



I have another render in the process of being created with the pins and ball, which I will tag on as soon as it's finished.

Striking Marbles

Below is a 3D render showing 3 glass marbles of varying size - each with an individual coloured swirl. All 3 glass marbles were given a slight tint of yellow to add a hint of realism to the scene.

Fish Balls

Here is a random 3D render I created whilst playing around with ideas. The fish reflected in the ball bearings is a clown fish. As to why there is a fish floating in mid air, I have no idea lol.

Better Than An Animated Gif - Glass Mountain :)

Here is my animation of the champagne fountain. This simulation took longer to create than I expected but I think it looks good. The original video looks better than the YouTube version here but you can pretty much make out everything from this adaptation.
Can you see the bubbles? :P

Download High Quality Version Here

Alcohol Fountain

Well in case you didn't get what would come next, the correct answer is the champagne tower with champagne!! :P

In this scene I had to turn the fluid resolution down just to get a render in a reasonable time frame. I decided to render the scene using Yafray but this ray tracer currently does not support transparent shadows, which is kind of essential with transparent materials. It's a shame as Yafray can render fluids so much more realistically. Therefore to use this ray tracer I decided to disable the shadows on the glasses and fluid.




Here is a render done without Yafray. The transparent shadows are there but the fluid does not look as crisp to me.



For the animation I have decided to stick with the Yafray version. Hopefully this animation will be posted soon :)

Tower Of Glass

As you can see from this render, the tower of champagne glasses has now taken shape :) I decided to remove the ice backing and use a darker tiled background so the glasses can be seen better.

I think its reasonably obvious what the next render will be :P



and if anyone had noticed the top glass is off centre! I didn't see this until after the render had finished (5 hours). This will be fixed for the next render with champagne.

Champagne Glass Challenge

Here is a render I created during my attempt at a new scene, which is still to come.

I created the champagne glasses first and then decided to place them on a wooden floor. Mirror effects were then partially enabled on the material to reflect the glasses, indicating the floor is shiny. The ice background was then added to give the scene a more surreal look (well that's the 'official' reason, it was more like I could not decide what to make the background so just randomly picked a texture, lol :P ). Enjoy :D

Don't Drink Too Much....

Well you've waited long enough so here is the video of the pouring wine animation. I have slowed the speed of the liquid so the splashing can be seen more easily.

As you can see there are some bugs in the animation on a number of frames. These errors occurred during the fluid calculation. As calculating the fluid took a long time on it's current resolution, I decided to animate what I had done. If I recalculate the fluid the errors should go away but I have decided to put this scene on the shelf to carry on with further creations.

The still renders of this scene show it in a better light :)

Download High Quality Version Here



At the start of this animation it shows the fluid as a fixed shape in the bottle. I decided to leave this in the animation to show the beginning shape I made for the fluid. The shapes volume becomes the liquid demonstrating how it is created. I would normally leave the liquid to rest before starting an animation.

A Splash Of Red?

As a further attempt to make another use for the glasses I made, I decided to create a bottle alongside one and develop a fluid simulation from the scene.

Below are 3 renders in sequence across the fluid simulation showing wine being poured into the glass and overflowing.





A fluid simulation of this scene will be uploaded soon for all to see.

Have A Glass On Me

Here is my first attempt at creating glass. During development I decided to add stems and turn them into wine glasses. Cheers! :P
This image was not created with maximum settings to reduce rendering times.

Shark in Action!

Here is the resulting animation created from the recently made ocean scene at sunset. I have made the shark fin move through the water coursing through the waves. Enjoy!

Download High Quality Version Here



I think that's enough ocean for now :P

Shark In The Sunset

After playing around more with the ocean scene, I recoloured the sky into a sunset and moved the sun level with the water at the horizon. The lighting was also manipulated to reflect the time of day and just for fun I decided to add a shark fin to the scene :P

Full Ocean Animation

Here is the animation / simulation I have made with the 3D Ocean. As the footage is 40 seconds long the time it took to render all the frames took longer than I thought (around 3-4 hours) but I decided to create an animation you can at least look at without it ending straight away.

Download High Quality Version Here

From Sea to Ocean

Here are the final renders of the sea I was experimenting with, as you can see it has now become a big ocean. I decided to make 2 renders of this scene for different water types.

The first render is of a deep dark blue ocean:



The second render is of a more shallow lighter ocean:

A 'Rough' Sea

Here is the initial stage of my attempt to create a realistic sea. This used a very rough rendering process with all fancy lighting effects and ray tracing disabled, enabling me to create the animation with little computational overhead.

More Eye Candy With A Logo

I decided to develop a logo for the blog to give my page more visual appeal. As you can see I have developed it in the same manner as all my other creations and was a learning exercise on how to manipulate models of 3D letters.

Gecko At Large!

This is the start of another project I endeavor to complete :P
The gecko is made up out of 1 extruded cube moulded into shape. A bump map is applied to the normal to give the gecko's scales depth.

Motionless Splash

This is a still picture I rendered taken from a single frame of the water animation below.
After scanning through the animation I found this frame to be one of the most active and interesting showing a key frame of the generated water.

The Water Effect

Here I created a short animation of splashing water using 'yet another free ray tracer' to render each frame creating a more photo realistic look.

Download High Quality Version Here

Jelly Without A Mold

Here is my first experiment using soft bodies on objects. I messed around with the soft bodies settings on the cubes and the Gecko(a long story, lol) to get them into a jelly like state. I then animated them to see how they reacted with gravity and how they deflected off solid surfaces as well as each other. Enjoy:)

Download High Quality Version Here

Cat's Eye

This is a closeup of the eye I used on the cat below. It consists of a white sphere making up the sclera, an iris, a lens which is transparent and allows a light source to refract through it and finally a black circle to make the pupil.

The Ginger Cat

This was my first attempt at using particles and is one of my initial creations while learning how to make a 3D model.